Reading up on the company’s history only recently, I saw various explanations for their failure. Wasn’t someone at the company aware that command-line-based programs were going the way of the 300-baud modem? Why Lotus didn’t see this revolution coming a mile away was a mystery to me. A few years later Lotus was basically gone. And, of course, they always wanted the latest toys. Highly paid traders were starting to require more and more sophisticated calculators-ones in which they could, say, cut-and-paste with their mouse. Even if Excel had only 80 per cent of Lotus’s functionality, there’s no way anyone would not be seduced by this product. I watched him work for about a minute, maybe less, and the first thought that came to my mind was: “Lotus is toast.” It was as if I’d been chiseling a message into a rock and someone walked over with a sketch pad and a fancy rollerball pen. I asked him what this program was, and he said it was Excel, a spreadsheet product from Microsoft that was a direct competitor to Lotus. What was happening in that world was still irrelevant.) (Note: At this time Macs were never ever used anywhere on Wall St. If you had to do any calculations more complex than simple addition or multiplication, which everyone did at some point or other, you needed Lotus. I was working in the financial industry at the time, though that hardly mattered because everyone used it.
LOTUS SYMPHONY SEARCH REPLACE NEWLINE WINDOWS
Windows was still just a fancy(-ish) GUI slapped on top of MS-DOS that ran the same old DOS programs, with the exception of a couple of graphics-mode showcase utilities, like a calculator. While most programs were still launched from the command-line, various graphical “operating environments,” including GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), were starting to vie for dominance in that world.
LOTUS SYMPHONY SEARCH REPLACE NEWLINE MAC
Real desktop publishing, the kind that had been available to Mac users forever, was only just becoming possible on “IBM-compatible” PCs, via programs like Ventura Publisher. That’s right: WordPerfect was still a serious competitor to Microsoft Word - or, to be more precise, Word was a competitor to WordPerfect.
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